Got a Professional Services Team? Use Salesforce? 5 Hot Tips that Can Change Your Life

Got a Professional Services Team? Use Salesforce? 5 Hot Tips that Can Change Your Life

Sarah Johansen

As a PS organization, you probably find yourself juggling competing priorities from customers, Finance, Sales and executives. We know that drill all too well and have jotted down some powerful tips to help you do the seemingly un-doable when it comes to meeting deliverables and maximizing utilization.
Tip #1 Social Project Management Is Awesome
Let teams really be teams. Improve collaboration and get immediate project updates from team members with Salesforce Chatter. You’ll bring Facebook-like collaboration to project delivery. You may even be using it already in other areas of your business. But for services it’s your golden ticket. It allows sales and project team members to share, update, schedule, broadcast, motivate, document everything related to a project across every boundary and time zone. All this from a single app.
Tip #2 Cloud App Strategy is the Way to Go
Today lots of business processes are getting managed in the cloud and organizations are moving fast to adopt, particularly with PSA solutions. But you need a cloud strategy to make the most of it all and truly transform your Services business. Your apps should sync, grow, and work together while leveraging each other’s best assets. And how they do that is by sharing the industry’s leading cloud platform, Force.com.
Tip #3 Embrace the Power of Integrated CRM
Would you like a guarantee that utilization numbers will go up and late project figures will go down? Studies prove that the best app strategy focuses on integrating a cloud PSA solution with your CRM so you get the performance you need. So if you have salesforce.com already, then a cloud PSA solution is a no-brainer. You can manage your people, customers, projects and financials in one integrated services management application. You will get better visibility into resource demand; target start dates; customer interactions; active projects; issues and risks; billing details; and, best of all, a single view of the customer. And you can do it all on Force.com.
Tip #4 Only go for Native Apps
Not all cloud apps are alike. You need to find the apps that truly “speak salesforce”. You want apps that provide a single sign-on, single UI, single account view – the same as Salesforce CRM. Apps that deliver 360° view of people, projects, and accounts. Once you get that, you will simplify all your most business-critical processes. And by going native to Force.com, integration headaches will be a thing of the past.
Tip #5 – Act Now
Don’t just read about it, do it. You will not regret any of the above!